AllThingsD » Lytrohttp://allthingsd.com
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14422Lytro Raises $40 Million to Keep Its Dream of Changing Photography in Focushttp://allthingsd.com/20131120/lytro-raises-40-million-to-keep-its-dream-of-changing-photography-in-focus/
http://allthingsd.com/20131120/lytro-raises-40-million-to-keep-its-dream-of-changing-photography-in-focus/#commentsWed, 20 Nov 2013 15:00:18 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=373860Camera startup Lytro is announcing $40 million in new funding that it said will help it move faster and reach its broader goals of reshaping photography.

The round of funding is being led by new investor North Bridge Venture Partners, with existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and Greylock Partners also adding to their investments.

“With the first generation of Lytro, there were just a lot of things to be figured out and understood and done,” Rosenthal said, adding that the company now has the technology more mature and the infrastructure and team in place to move more quickly. “What you should see from us is just a faster pace of innovation than we have been able to accomplish before.”

Rosenthal said the company wants to move in reasonably short order into professional photography, motion picture cameras and making its existing consumer products thinner, cheaper and lighter.

“We definitely won’t get to them all in 18 months, but we will get to more than one,” he said.

Lytro had some job cuts and executive departures earlier this year, but Rosenthal said the company has been hiring for the last couple months as the funding round came together.

The company hasn’t released sales figures, though Rosenthal insists sales this year are ahead of the company’s internal plan.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131120/lytro-raises-40-million-to-keep-its-dream-of-changing-photography-in-focus/feed/0Lytro Adds 3-D Viewing Capability to Its Living Images, Apple Online Store as Distributorhttp://allthingsd.com/20131112/lytro-adds-3-d-viewing-capability-to-its-living-images-apple-online-store-as-distributor/
http://allthingsd.com/20131112/lytro-adds-3-d-viewing-capability-to-its-living-images-apple-online-store-as-distributor/#commentsTue, 12 Nov 2013 15:00:35 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=371609Lytro is unlocking another feature for images taken with its light-field cameras, enabling all photos ever taken with the devices to be displayed in 3-D.

Lytro

The camera startup is also announcing that Apple will start selling Lytro models through its online stores.

Lytro has been showing off 3-D as a potential feature since it first unveiled its technology more than two years ago, but has taken its time adding it as a publicly available capability.

“It took us some work to get to the point where we thought it was fully consumer-ready,” CEO Jason Rosenthal said in an interview. “The work was in making it easily usable and consumer-friendly — which has been one of the challenges for 3-D in general.”

The 3-D features will work with 3-D displays, or on standard displays while wearing those old-school red-and-blue glasses.

Rosenthal wouldn’t say how many cameras Lytro has sold, but insists that business remains on track, with sales this year 20 percent ahead of the company’s goal.

He also remained noncommittal on when the company might update its hardware. Though Lytro has added a number of features to its core product through software updates, it is still selling the same hardware that it debuted in 2011.

“I cannot be more excited about what we’ve got in the works,” Rosenthal insisted. “You will be pleasantly surprised both with the products and the timing.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131112/lytro-adds-3-d-viewing-capability-to-its-living-images-apple-online-store-as-distributor/feed/0Surprise: Lytro Has Hidden Wi-Fi Capability, Now Can Connect to the iPhonehttp://allthingsd.com/20130619/surprise-lytro-has-hidden-wi-fi-capability-now-can-connect-to-the-iphone/
http://allthingsd.com/20130619/surprise-lytro-has-hidden-wi-fi-capability-now-can-connect-to-the-iphone/#commentsWed, 19 Jun 2013 19:00:02 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=332214One of the benefits of Lytro’s “living pictures” is that they get better over time.

Already since launch, Lytro has added several features, including the ability to add filters and create a sense of motion. There is also enough information in its special light-field files to create a full 3-D image, something the company will likely enable down the road.

It turns out that Lytro’s camera itself has been hiding some extra capabilities. Lytro is announcing today that its camera actually has Wi-Fi built in, which the company is now unlocking to allow the camera to wirelessly connect to an iPhone for uploading and sharing pictures on the fly.

Through a new free app for the iPhone — and a firmware update to the camera — Lytro owners can connect via Wi-Fi to view their pictures and share them online. The camera shows up as a Wi-Fi network to which the iPhone can connect for the purpose of sharing photos. (As a result, the iPhone can’t simultaneously use Wi-Fi to both connect to the camera and to an Internet hotspot.)

The move gives camera owners a way to share pictures on the go, removing the necessity of first connecting the camera back to a computer. What’s being sent is a compressed version of the full light-field image, with each file using about five megabytes of space, as opposed to the uncompressed file, which uses about 16MB. It’s a tradeoff of quality versus file size and upload speed.

“We’ve opted for a nice balance,” said Eric Cheng, Lytro’s director of photography.

Lytro also hopes to build more community, including a way in the iPhone app to discover and view popular images from other camera owners.

With the iPhone app, Lytro is starting to shift some of the processing work to the cloud, rather than relying on its Mac and PC apps to do the heavy lifting.

It is also finally letting camera owners share beyond the Lytro embedded player. Owners now have an option to create an animated GIF file of either an image being refocused or undergoing a 3-D-like parallax effect, which Lytro calls “perspective shift.” (Lytro has actually had this under its hat for a while, too, creating this custom animated GIF after the camera’s onstage demo at AsiaD.)

An Android app is on the road map, too, though Cheng didn’t have a specific time frame.

As for other surprises the Lytro camera might be hiding, it also has a yet-to-be-utilized Bluetooth chip, Cheng confirmed.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130619/surprise-lytro-has-hidden-wi-fi-capability-now-can-connect-to-the-iphone/feed/0Lytro Names Former Ning Head Rosenthal as CEOhttp://allthingsd.com/20130319/lytro-names-former-ning-head-rosenthal-as-ceo/
http://allthingsd.com/20130319/lytro-names-former-ning-head-rosenthal-as-ceo/#commentsTue, 19 Mar 2013 16:00:36 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=304474Light field camera maker Lytro is naming former Ning chief Jason Rosenthal as its new CEO.

Rosenthal, who also worked at HP/Opsware, Netscape and AOL, takes over a company with a unique technology but lots of work ahead of it. Though its product is unlike those of its rivals, it competes in the broader camera market against heavyweights Nikon, Canon and Sony. Plus, there’s the fact that many people are just using their cellphones rather than carry a camera.

Charles Chi, who had been acting CEO, will remain on the company’s board of directors, while former CEO and founder Ren Ng will remain in his post as executive chairman.

An announcement of Rosenthal’s hiring is expected to come later on Tuesday.

In an interview, Chi said that Lytro wasn’t looking for a lead engineer or a head marketer, as it feels it is well-stocked in both regards.

“What we are looking for is somebody who has some experience in developing transformational businesses,” he told AllThingsD. “That’s what Lytro is in the midst of — getting a new idea adopted across a mature marketplace.”

Chi said that he was also looking for someone who could mesh well with Lytro’s culture, which includes young people and experienced managers as well as a range of disciplines.

“We’re doing a lot of different things,” he said. “Everything from component-level work to systems to firmware to lens optics and Web and desktop software.”

As for where Lytro is headed in the coming months, Chi said to expect continued advances.

“We’ve really just scratched the surface of the potential of the technology,” he said. “Our first product was really a testament to what was possible.”

So will we see a follow-on camera this year, or just more updates to the existing one? Chi wouldn’t say.

A little more than two years after launch, Path, the self-proclaimed “private social network” startup, is beginning to focus more on monetization.

Hence the hiring of Kim Jabal as the company’s first CFO, who will spearhead the large task of eventually turning Path into a profitable service.

Jabal comes to Path after a year-long stint as VP of finance at Lytro, the experimental camera startup, where she handled the company’s finance, accounting and tax-related activities. Previous to that, she spent more than eight years at Google in multiple finance-focused positions, including directorships in the online sales department, investor relations, and ultimately as director of engineering finance.

In an interview, Jabal echoed Path CEO Dave Morin’s recent comments on monetization prospects, focusing in the near term on potential monetization options like virtual goods, or a premium subscription service. Her hiring, too, could begin to dispel the notion that Path is looking for an exit through an acquisition by another major company like Yahoo or Google (the latter of which has courted Path before).

“Look, we’re trying to build a long-term, sustainable company,” Jabal told me. “We’re not trying to sell the company. I wouldn’t have come if I thought they were going to get bought next month.”

She also made it clear that the company is still looking to heavily recruit software engineers.

Jabal started her first day at Path just last week.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130306/path-hires-ex-google-lytro-finance-head-as-new-cfo/feed/1With New Features, Lytro Aims to Show Its Futuristic Camera Is No One-Trick Ponyhttp://allthingsd.com/20121115/with-new-features-lytro-aims-to-show-its-futuristic-camera-is-no-one-trick-pony/
http://allthingsd.com/20121115/with-new-features-lytro-aims-to-show-its-futuristic-camera-is-no-one-trick-pony/#commentsThu, 15 Nov 2012 23:30:48 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=270091Camera maker Lytro has captured a lot of attention for its photos that can be refocused after a picture is taken.

But the start-up has a broader story that is only now becoming clear. By capturing far more data then just points of light, Lytro’s light-field images can be displayed in a variety of other ways.

Photo credit: Eric Cheng / Lytro

With a software update due Dec. 4, Lytro camera owners will soon have several new ways to manipulate their photos. One, which Lytro has been demoing for a while–and showed at our AsiaD event–is something called perspective shift.

The technique allows one to gain some three-dimensional perspective by subtly shaking a picture back and forth. (The embedded animated GIF with Walt Mossberg from AsiaD gives a sense for the effect.)

The effect must be enabled from Lytro’s Mac or PC software, but from there it is viewable on any device with HTML5 support. On an iPad, the perspective shift can even be viewed by moving the iPad around and using the tablet’s accelerometer to shift perspectives.

Lytro is also adding a series of filters to its software. While many image programs, from Photoshop to Instagram, can apply filters, Lytro’s filters can have different effects on the foreground and background and transform when the focus is changed or when the photo is put into perspective shift.

For instance, a mosaic effect keeps the focal point looking normal while the background is transformed into a series of tiles. Crayon (seen in this photo of sunflowers) keeps the focal point in color while making the rest of the photo black and white. Another, Blur+, heightens the blur of the parts of a Lytro picture that are not in focus.

Lytro

Update: Lytro said test photos showing off the new features are loading slowly, so we’ve taken them out for now. We hope to have them back in shortly. In the mean time, this static image shows the Crayon filter

Combined, the perspective shift and new filters should help give the public a better sense for what the Lytro camera is capable of, says Eric Cheng, Lytro’s director of photography.

“I think that’s what we are most excited about,” Cheng told AllThingsD. “[We’re] showing how much data is captured and how we might use it going forward.”

As with other improvements, Lytro is making the change in software, meaning the new capabilities work not just on new pictures being taken, but also on all Lytro photos already captured.

Adding perspective shift does require the pictures to be reprocessed — a step that can take half a minute per photo. But at that point the photos can have filters applied and be shared back to the Web.

The move comes as the company is gearing up for the holidays. After months of working its way through a backlog of orders, Lytro has caught up to demand (though it won’t say how many cameras it has sold). The company is also broadening availability, which until recently had been limited to sales on its own Web site.

The company is expanding into a few international markets as well as Amazon and the Target and Best Buy Web sites, along with a handful of brick-and-mortar CityTarget stores.

In the mean time, here’s a YouTube video Lytro has done showing the perspective shift feature in action.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121115/with-new-features-lytro-aims-to-show-its-futuristic-camera-is-no-one-trick-pony/feed/0Lytro Adds Manual Focus, New Accessories to Its Refocusable Camerahttp://allthingsd.com/20121009/lytro-adds-manual-focus-new-accessories-to-its-refocusable-camera/
http://allthingsd.com/20121009/lytro-adds-manual-focus-new-accessories-to-its-refocusable-camera/#commentsTue, 09 Oct 2012 15:00:35 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=258176Start-up Lytro said Tuesday that it will release a free software update that offers advanced users finer control over the camera.

With the new controls, shutterbugs will be able to choose the shutter speed and ISO settings of the pictures they are taking. Photographers will also be able to lock an exposure setting by tapping on the screen — similar to how this is done on an iPhone.

“We introduced these features as a result of feedback from our most creative camera owners, who are capturing things like subjects in motion or experimenting with artistic styles like light painting,” Lytro director of photography Eric Cheng said in a statement. “With manual controls, they now have more flexibility as they push the boundaries of the light field.”

The company is also adding a handful of accessories, including a $29.95 sleeve and a $59.95 camera case. The camera will also be available in two new colors — Seaglass and Moxie Pink.

Lytro recently expanded distribution of the camera to the Web sites of Amazon, Best Buy and Target, as well as to a handful of urban CityTarget locations and a few other countries.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121009/lytro-adds-manual-focus-new-accessories-to-its-refocusable-camera/feed/0Light-Field Camera Maker Lytro Expands Into Stores in U.S. and Internationallyhttp://allthingsd.com/20120925/light-field-camera-maker-lytro-expands-into-stores-in-u-s-and-internationally/
http://allthingsd.com/20120925/light-field-camera-maker-lytro-expands-into-stores-in-u-s-and-internationally/#commentsTue, 25 Sep 2012 14:05:07 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=253888Lytro, the maker of a new kind of camera that can refocus after a picture is taken, said Tuesday that it will, for the first time, start selling the camera via other retailers.

The company had been selling the $400 camera exclusively via its Web site, but will start selling via Amazon and on the Web sites of Target and BestBuy, as well as instore at a handful of urban CityTarget outlets. The company also plans to start selling internationally through partners in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Lytro isn’t saying how many cameras it has sold so far, but the company said that nearly 400,000 pictures have been uploaded to its Web site.

“We are excited to take this picture revolution one step further by making Lytro available to more photographers in the U.S. and around the world,” CEO Charles Chi said in a statement.

The Lytro camera will be available at the additional U.S. online retailers starting Oct. 9, and in the CityTarget locations in November.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120925/light-field-camera-maker-lytro-expands-into-stores-in-u-s-and-internationally/feed/0Lytro's Light Field Camera Now Speaks Windowshttp://allthingsd.com/20120724/lytros-light-field-camera-now-speaks-windows/
http://allthingsd.com/20120724/lytros-light-field-camera-now-speaks-windows/#commentsTue, 24 Jul 2012 17:34:00 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=233288Lytro said Tuesday that its revolutionary camera, which previously only supported the Mac, now works with the 64-bit versions of Windows 7. The company also announced two accessories for the camera: a tripod mount and a wall charger.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120724/lytros-light-field-camera-now-speaks-windows/feed/0Exclusive: Lytro CEO Ren Ng to Step Aside, Become Executive Chairmanhttp://allthingsd.com/20120629/exclusive-lytro-ceo-ren-ng-to-step-aside-become-executive-chairman/
http://allthingsd.com/20120629/exclusive-lytro-ceo-ren-ng-to-step-aside-become-executive-chairman/#commentsFri, 29 Jun 2012 19:30:39 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=226152Lytro CEO Ren Ng said Friday that he is stepping aside as CEO of the light-field photography company, in order to spend more time on the vision for the company and less on its day-to-day operations.

“The complexity of running day-to-day operations continues to grow,” Ng told AllThingsD. “We are strengthening the management team to prepare ourselves for the next big phase of the company.”

Unlike a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, Ng notes that Lytro has opted to handle all aspects of its business, including hardware, software, distribution and support. That has left him with less time to be the voice of the company and work on the future of the company’s technology.

Ng will become executive chairman and will remain at Lytro full time. The company has launched an external search for a new CEO. In the meantime, current Executive Chairman Charles Chi will serve as interim CEO. It was Chi who demonstrated the Lytro to Walt Mossberg at our AsiaD conference last fall.

Before joining Lytro, Chi was a general partner at venture firm Greylock Partners for 10 years.

Although Lytro is still working through the growing pains of manufacturing and shipping its first product, the company has grown rapidly, raising roughly $50 million in funding, and expanding to 80 employees.

Lytro hasn’t said how many cameras it has sold since beginning shipments earlier this year.

“We’re not disclosing numbers externally but sales have been very good, and continue to exceed our current supply,” Ng said.

Ng did say the company has increased manufacturing capacity and has shrunk the wait time for those placing orders from several months to about a month. “We hope to be in a place to ship immediately soon,” he said.

For the time being, the company plans to continue selling the device directly, and is primarily focused on improving its software for the current camera more than actively developing the next generation of hardware.

As for the CEO search, Ng said there isn’t a specific time frame.

“We’re getting going right away,” he said. “We’ll take the time it requires to find a great candidate.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120629/exclusive-lytro-ceo-ren-ng-to-step-aside-become-executive-chairman/feed/0Letters From SXSW: How to Be "Disruptive"http://allthingsd.com/20120312/letters-from-sxsw-how-to-be-disruptive/
http://allthingsd.com/20120312/letters-from-sxsw-how-to-be-disruptive/#commentsMon, 12 Mar 2012 23:00:03 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=184815In the tech industry, we hear the term “disruptive” a lot. But what does it take to really disrupt a category of technology?

It’s certainly not easy — the road to disruption can be paved with premature launches, faulty products, tepid or negative consumer reaction and lawsuits — and that’s usually after years of research and development and dollars spent.

The minds behind Jawbone, the Nest thermostat and the new Lytro camera came together on Monday to discuss this exact topic on a SXSW Interactive panel.

All agreed on two points: Good design is critical, and even if you’re a hardware company, you’re not just a hardware company anymore.

“The way we see it, it’s hardware and software services,” said Matt Rogers, co-founder of Nest, which late last year launched a new “smart” thermostat. “You have to think of how these pieces tie together: When you pair it with your iPhone, how’s it going to work? And that’s incredibly difficult, some of the most difficult engineering we’ve done.”

For Ren Ng, founder and chief executive of Lytro, introducing a new type of camera meant not only designing a new light-capturing sensor, but also creating an entirely new form factor. “You can’t just build software, because it’s connecting an entirely new kind of data inside. So, for us, it was clear that we had to build new hardware, too.”

Jawbone, which is known for products pairing audio technology with hardware devices, said technology companies have to deliver a complete experience that’s cohesive to consumers.

“The barrier to entry for hardware has come down, but the barrier to great hardware has not actually gone down, and I think that’s given a false sense of hope to some people,” said Travis Bogard, Jawbone’s vice president of product management.

“It means putting cost and good design into products,” Bogard said. “These are not easy decisions to make.”

And while many tech entrepreneurs hold Apple products up as the pinnacle of design, these “disruptors” said that reaching almost-perfection means killing your design darlings — often many times over.

Bogard said that with the UP wristband, Jawbone was actually set to launch the product six months earlier than it did, but the company decided the band needed to be 30 percent smaller. Nest’s Rogers said the company threw away many designs before settling on “the one.”

“To take something you think is beautiful, and say it’s not good enough yet, and throw it away, it takes a lot of effort,” Rogers said. “It’s emotionally intensive, and it’s also cost-intensive. It’s impossible to get to perfection, but as entrepreneurs and designers, that’s what we strive for.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120312/letters-from-sxsw-how-to-be-disruptive/feed/0Radical Camera Lets You Pick What's Blurry And What's Nothttp://allthingsd.com/20120229/radical-camera-lets-you-pick-whats-blurry-and-whats-not/
http://allthingsd.com/20120229/radical-camera-lets-you-pick-whats-blurry-and-whats-not/#commentsWed, 29 Feb 2012 22:04:59 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=179513The consumer point-and-shoot camera has just been reinvented—not tweaked, or remodeled, but actually re-thought from top to bottom. A Silicon Valley start-up called Lytro is shipping this week a camera that looks like no other and actually lets you focus or refocus your pictures on a computer after you take them.

Not only that, but the company is promising that pictures you take with the camera today will be able to be manipulated after the fact in additional ways in coming months. For instance, you’ll be able to snap into focus everything at once, regardless of depth. Or change the perspective from which the picture is seen, and switch a photo back and forth between 2-D and 3-D. That’s why it calls the images “living pictures.”

This $399 camera, also called Lytro, can do all this because it is a so-called light-field camera, which is based on a different technology from traditional digital cameras. In simple terms, it uses a modified sensor, plus proprietary software, to capture and process more, and different, information about the light hitting its lens than other cameras do. This includes the direction of light rays. The result is a richer picture file that software, on the camera and on a computer, can use to manipulate images in new ways. Lytro doesn’t even classify its camera by the familiar megapixel measure. Instead, the company says it has a resolution of 11 megarays—in other words, it can capture 11 million light rays.

Just as the technology is very different, so is the camera itself. It looks sort of like a short, square, pocket-size telescope, with a nonprotruding 8X zoom lens on one end and a touch-screen viewfinder on the other. It has only two buttons and a zoom slider. It starts instantly and is instantly ready to take the next picture, because it doesn’t need to perform autofocusing. It can be purchased in three colors at lytro.com. The base model can hold about 350 pictures. There is also a $499 model that can hold 750 pictures.

The company provides a free desktop app and a free online service, where you can view, share and manipulate the pictures.

I’ve been testing the Lytro and found it does just what it says. I was able to take rapid-fire shots that looked good on my computer, and that could be focused and refocused, uploaded to the Internet and shared. I consider it a revolution in consumer photography, with more benefits to come.

The Lytro camera is lightweight and small enough to fit in a pocket.

But as in most revolutions, there are some downsides and trade-offs to the Lytro, at least at launch. For instance, it doesn’t shoot video. Its “living pictures” can’t be imported into standard photo software, only to its own accompanying software. And that Lytro software—necessary to store and share the photos—works only on Macs; a Windows version is due later this year. (However, Lytro pictures uploaded from the Mac software to Lytro’s photo service, or to Facebook, can be viewed and refocused on Windows PCs and mobile devices via a Web browser.)

The pictures can be exported into the standard JPEG format for use in other software, but then they lose their ability to be refocused.

Also, the company is still working on tools for editing the photos, so, for now, you can’t do common things like cropping, or changing brightness or contrast. The camera lacks a flash, though this is partly offset by its unusually large f/2 lens, which is always fully open, letting in a lot of available light, even when zoomed. Also, the camera doesn’t come with a charger. You have to charge it, slowly, by plugging it into a computer, or, more rapidly, by using one of a list of approved chargers from other devices, such as an iPhone charger.

Importing the pictures can be slow, because a lot of processing is involved and the files are relatively large—about 16 megabytes in my tests. Photos you “star” on the camera as favorites get processed first.

But the main drawback to the Lytro I discovered is that it takes a while to learn how to spot and frame pictures that show off the camera’s refocusing abilities. Also, in many common situations, such as taking a simple picture of a single face or object, the refocusing ability just doesn’t come into play, since it works best when there are multiple objects arranged so that some are in the foreground and some are in the background.

The company offers videos to help you learn this new type of photography. In them, for instance, a host advises that it is good to get very close to an object in the foreground—so close, that it looks blurry in the viewfinder. One is at http://vimeo.com/37336723. You can see the refocusing in action at a sample gallery at Lytro.com.

After a few days, however, I was able to get interesting pictures whose focus could be changed to bring out details. For instance, I took a picture of a cup of coffee perched on a car hood. Afterward, when I tapped on the viewfinder on the image of the coffee, it became sharp. When I next tapped on a blurry concrete-and-brick step in the background of the photo, it suddenly became sharp—instead of the cup—and a crack in the concrete that hadn’t been visible appeared.

In another case, I took a shot of a bush about eight feet in front of a fieldstone wall. With a simple click, I was able to make either the bush, or the wall, crystal clear.

When I uploaded these pictures via my Mac to Lytro.com, the company’s free photo-sharing site, or to a test account on Facebook, I was able to change the focus again—even on a Windows PC or an iPad—and so will my friends who see them. You can email friends links to your Lytro.com photos.

The Lytro took almost no pictures that were out of focus. But in a couple of cases, where I was more than six inches away from a simple object that was out of focus, clicking on it brought it into focus. However, the Lytro can’t correct motion blur.

There are two shooting modes. In Everyday Mode, the optical zoom is limited to 3.5X, and the area in which refocusing works is fixed. In Creative mode, the Zoom is at the full 8X, and you can tap on the viewfinder to set the point around which the picture can be refocused.

The Lytro comes in three colors, with the red version capable of holding 750 pictures.

The battery is sealed, but battery life was good. The company says you can take 400 to 600 pictures, depending on usage, between charges.

The camera is 4.4 inches long, 1.6 inches in height and width, and weighs about 7.5 ounces. I found it fit in a jacket pocket easily. The front of the camera is aluminum and the rear is rubberized. The power and shutter buttons are on the rubberized part. So is a touch slider built into the surface for controlling the zoom.

The touch screen has only a few icons, which you make visible by swiping upward. One swipe changes from Everyday to Creative mode. In Everyday mode, tapping the viewfinder image sets the exposure.

The Lytro is an exciting and novel leap in digital photography, but because it still has some missing features, like flash and a file format that works in other software, buyers should consider it a second camera, at least for now.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120229/radical-camera-lets-you-pick-whats-blurry-and-whats-not/feed/0A Lytro in Hand Helps Bring Mobile World Congress Into Focushttp://allthingsd.com/20120229/a-lytro-look-at-mobile-world-congress/
http://allthingsd.com/20120229/a-lytro-look-at-mobile-world-congress/#commentsWed, 29 Feb 2012 22:00:49 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=179386While the first Lytro cameras are just now making their way to customers, AllThingsD has spent the past two weeks putting the device to work.

But having the Lytro and its living pictures full-time has provided a unique way to tell the story of the world’s biggest cellphone conference.

For those who need a quick primer, Lytro’s camera uses a new type of imaging that offers a number of advantages, including the ability to refocus pictures after they are taken, to shoot without focusing first and to take images in very low-light conditions without the need for a flash. (For more, check out Walt Mossberg’s review of Lytro’s camera.)

We’ve been stealthily trying to capture as many scenes from Barcelona as possible, all while being surrounded by a million tech enthusiasts, bloggers and journalists.

We managed to pull it out briefly at Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch as well as at a number of other press conferences and booths. Only a few times did we get caught by people who actually knew what we were carrying.

Anyway, below are some of the highlights. I also had the camera in hand during last week’s visit to Finland, including shots at Nokia and Rovio. But I’ll save those for tomorrow.

In the meantime, here are some of the shots from Barcelona. Remember to click around the Lytro pictures to change the focus. All of these have some fun variability.

The first shot is one of Sony’s new Xperias. Click on the phone screen to bring that into focus.

The view from Hotel Miramar, site of the Windows 8 event (try clicking on the wine glass)

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120229/a-lytro-look-at-mobile-world-congress/feed/0CES Fun With Lytro's Light Field Camerahttp://allthingsd.com/20120117/ces-fun-with-lytros-light-field-camera/
http://allthingsd.com/20120117/ces-fun-with-lytros-light-field-camera/#commentsTue, 17 Jan 2012 20:04:31 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=164345It’s a sign of how few truly revolutionary things were shown in Vegas last week that one of the most interesting devices I handled was the Lytro camera that I have been writing about for months.

While I had already seen the light field camera and taken my first picture at AsiaD in Hong Kong back in October, at the Consumer Electronics Show I got a full hour to play around with it.

The demo was part of an event the start-up had at the Wynn hotel, where journalists and a few of the company’s fans could get some face time with the device, which is just starting to ship to customers.

Taking pictures actually did take some getting used to, which surprised me, but it was a lot of fun once I got the hang of it.

Here are some of my more successful efforts. Again, for those who haven’t yet played around with one of Lytro’s “living pictures,” just click anywhere in the frame to put that part of the image into focus.

In this shot, try focusing on the nearest gold ball to get a glimpse of the camera and photographer, and then click on the phone in the back to see it come into focus:

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120117/ces-fun-with-lytros-light-field-camera/feed/0Interactive iPad Book Brings DSLR Camera Lessons to Lifehttp://allthingsd.com/20111216/interactive-ipad-book-brings-dslr-camera-lessons-to-life/
http://allthingsd.com/20111216/interactive-ipad-book-brings-dslr-camera-lessons-to-life/#commentsFri, 16 Dec 2011 16:00:31 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=154448Are you buying someone a fancy DSLR camera for Christmas? Might want to throw in a $9.99 iPad app, too. Well, that’s what Open Air Publishing is hoping you’ll do, with the release of its “Master Your DSLR” iPad book today.

Built on the Inkling platform, the slickly designed book includes material like videos, tours, slideshows and cheat sheets for common shooting scenarios.

For instance, in the screenshot shown here, a reader could scrub along a series of different shutter speeds to see how they affect pictures of the same waterfall.

I was particularly interested in a section on solving common photography problems, like blurry images and uneven lighting. (But perhaps you could escape those issues by forgetting the whole DSLR thing and buying a Lytro.)

Open Air’s first iPad book, “Speakeasy Cocktails,” was named one of Apple’s best apps of 2011. The New York City-based company also recently released a holiday cookbook app. The DSLR book was written by tech journalist David Becker, with video tutorials by photojournalist Mary F. Calvert.

We are now posting the full videos from the recent AsiaD conference, which took place in Hong Kong in October.

Over the next two weeks, we’re going to follow the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Lytro, a groundbreaking camera that uses a new technology called light field photography to create “living pictures” that can be refocused after they are taken, in addition to other cool stuff (see a gyrating Walt Mossberg above).

There is no question that this demo of Lytro was one of the highlights of AsiaD.

Founded by Ren Ng in 2006, the result is demonstrated by Chairman Charles Chi and Director of Photography Eric Cheng onstage with Walt:

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20111105/living-photo-magic-with-lytro-the-full-asiad-demo/feed/0At Long Last, Hands-on With Lytro's Living Camerahttp://allthingsd.com/20111023/at-long-last-hands-on-with-lytros-living-camera/
http://allthingsd.com/20111023/at-long-last-hands-on-with-lytros-living-camera/#commentsSun, 23 Oct 2011 14:00:59 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=135789After spending the past several months writing about Lytro, its launch and road to market, it was fun to finally get a chance to give it a try at this past week’s AsiaD conference in Hong Kong.

Photo credit: Eric Cheng / Lytro

The technology hasn’t changed since its June debut. Under the hood, Lytro’s camera uses a new technology called light field photography, which allows for so-called “living pictures” that can be refocused after they are taken, in addition to performing a few other tricks.

What is new is the design of the camera, which until last week had been carefully hidden from public view. It’s only about an inch high and wide, and several inches long — mostly to accommodate the eight-inch zoom. It’s got just two buttons — one for turning on the camera, the other for pressing the shutter. Other moves, such as zooming and viewing pictures, are accomplished by manipulating the multitouch display on the rear of the camera, or a touch-sensitive zone along the top of the camera.

While Lytro’s images have become well-known for their ability to be refocused, one of the harder-to-explain features is the 3-D-like feature, achievable through something called parallax. Luckily, this can be illustrated with an animated image, like the one below, from Lytro’s onstage demo with Walt Mossberg.

The picture I took of the AsiaD stage is a more typical light field composition, with various spots that can be brought into focus. Try clicking on the iPhone screen, the camera viewfinder and the stage to see the different focal points.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20111023/at-long-last-hands-on-with-lytros-living-camera/feed/0Lytro Demo at AsiaD (Video)http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-demo-at-asiad-video/
http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-demo-at-asiad-video/#commentsThu, 20 Oct 2011 05:32:18 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=134596Lytro, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, has built a whole new kind of camera that works by recording all available light in any particular scene. Chairman Charles Chi and Director of Photography Eric Cheng demonstrated the groundbreaking light field camera on stage Thursday morning at AsiaD. Video below:

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-demo-at-asiad-video/feed/11Lytro Comes Into Focus (AsiaD Demo)http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-comes-into-focus-asiad-demo/
http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-comes-into-focus-asiad-demo/#commentsThu, 20 Oct 2011 00:54:31 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=133112For a generation now, camera development has been measured in megapixels, but Lytro, which demoed today at AsiaD, is hoping its new camera will constitute the biggest leap in imaging since we swapped film for digital.

The company, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, has built a whole new kind of camera capable of performing a number of tricks that standard digital cameras just can’t do. The technology works by capturing a whole scene and digitally recording all the light available, instead of bringing a specific element into focus.

Lytro calls the resulting images “living pictures,” because each one contains more data than the single visible frame can display. After taking the picture, users of the camera can choose what they want in focus, and even switch between 2D and a subtle 3D image.

“We’re capturing this multi-dimensional set of data and… we can create some really really different and amazing pictures,” Lytro Chairman Charles Chi said, while demonstrating the camera on stage at AsiaD.

In addition to its bag of tricks, Lytro is touting the speed of the camera. Because the camera doesn’t need to focus, the image capture is nearly instantaneous. The light field technology also improves picture-taking in dark places without a flash.

The technology is an outgrowth of Ng’s doctoral work at Stanford in what is called “light field” imaging.

Ng hopes Lytro can upset a digital camera industry that has been dominated by the Japanese giants of imaging, Canon and Nikon, for generations. Its first cameras will ship early next year, with models starting at $399.

As for the camera itself, it boasts an f/2 aperture even when using its 8x zoom. It only has two buttons, with a touch surface used for the zooming. The back of the camera is a small multitouch screen that can be used to compose and view pictures.

The technology behind Lytro is compelling enough to have attracted $50 million in venture investment to date, including sizable chunks from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, K9, and NEA.

All are hoping Lytro can take a serious chunk out of the traditional digital camera industry, which the company claimed was worth nearly $40 billion in 2010.

AllThingsD‘s Ina Fried contributed from Hong Kong.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-comes-into-focus-asiad-demo/feed/3Lytro Light Field Camera Revealedhttp://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-light-field-camera-revealed/
http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-light-field-camera-revealed/#commentsWed, 19 Oct 2011 17:59:27 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=133747Today in San Francisco, digital camera and imaging start-up Lytro is unveiling a consumer digital camera that it claims will be the biggest technological jump since we started talking megapixels over 20 years ago.

In case you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick rundown of what’s expected today:

Lytro, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, is an outgrowth of his Stanford University PhD research into what is called “light field photography.”

Without getting too technical, a light field camera captures light all throughout the scene in front of the lens, as opposed to the cameras consumers are used to, which bring a particular thing into focus first.

The result is an image that can be focused after it is taken, and, Lytro claims, a camera that is faster from power-up to capture, and has exceptional performance in low light, even without a flash.

Lytro claims it has spent the last five years and nearly $50 million from several of Silicon Valley’s heaviest-weight VC firms working to pack all that technology into a camera small enough to compete with the myriad point-and-shoots currently available.

For those who need a quick reintroduction to Lytro, it’s the Mountain View start-up focused on building a new kind of camera using a technology that allows for instant image capture, 3-D pictures from a single lens and the ability to refocus images after they are shot. It is that last feature that most captured public imagination when the company revealed itself. Lytro uses a new type of image sensor that captures an entire light field as opposed to just the total amount of light hitting a particular spot.

Since its big coming-out party, the team has been focusing its work on two fronts — getting the hardware ready to go on sale later this year, and continuing to seed early units to pro photographers and having its own staff take plenty of pictures.

The company has had no shortage of inquiries from folks wanting to be the first to use Lytro’s cameras to do this or that.

While the company says no a lot more than it says yes to such requests, it has gotten a few offers that were too good to refuse.

Photo Credit: Kira Wampler

Days after the launch, the company got an unsolicited email from model Coco Rocha, volunteering to be the first high-fashion model to be shot using light field photography.

“I thought it was spam,” said CEO Ren Ng.

But sure enough, it was from the Canadian model. A couple of weeks later, Lytro photography director Eric Cheng was taking pictures with her on the streets of Manhattan.

Lytro also got an inquiry from photographer Philip Andrews, who wanted to use a Lytro camera to shoot the final space shuttle trip. Andrews had a very short time frame to learn the ins and outs of the camera before the final mission, but was able to capture some cool shots of both the cockpit and the emotional scene of that last landing.

Lytro is also looking to see how the camera performs in the hands of nonprofessionals, who are, after all, the company’s target market. Kira Wampler, who heads the company’s marketing efforts, has been checking out a test unit each weekend. Even familiar spots like her family’s Russian River cabin have become fun to photograph again, she said. The instant shutter allowed her to capture her kids — one cranky and the other smiling — in a shot that finally landed her in the company’s online gallery. (Ng still decides which shots go there.)

More importantly, Lytro’s “living pictures” have become the expectation at Wampler’s home. Conventional pictures are “boring,” five-year-old daughter Sophie informed her mom.

Photo Credit: Eric Cheng

“That’s a lot of the spark we are igniting,” Wampler said.

Meanwhile, many on Lytro’s team have been shuttling between Silicon Valley and the Asian manufacturing facility where the first cameras are being produced. While the design itself has been fully baked for some weeks now, the company has been working on smaller refinements and on validating the manufacturing and supply chain process.

The company has also been growing its ranks as it gears up to launch its first products. It now has 55 employees, up from about 35 in June, and is looking for bigger digs near its current offices.

Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Blake Krikorian has joined the board of Amazon, according to several sources close to the situation.

Krikorian — who is considered one of tech’s most savvy execs with regard to video and media distribution — co-founded Sling Media, the maker of the innovative video device Slingbox, in 2004.

(He demoed it at the second D: All Things Digital conference in 2004.)

It was sold in 2007 to EchoStar Communications for $380 million. After a short stint there, Krikorian left and has since been working on a variety of projects and making various investments.

Those include some promising start-ups, such as Lytro, Kno, Clipboard, Chirply and Tasty Labs. Another company he invested in, Clicker, was sold to CBS earlier this year.

He has also been a sought-after exec — sources said he had offers over the last year from Google and also Zynga.

Amazon certainly could use a director such as Krikorian as it seeks to enter the media distribution space more aggressively. It is about to launch a Kindle tablet, for example, and also is a major bidder for the Hulu premium video service.

It has been rumored that Amazon will soon offer an interactive television device, too.

Krikorian certainly has much experience in the arena. One of his first jobs was at the fabled General Magic, which pioneered the creation of one of the first interactive mobile products before the Internet.

He also started a mobile computing unit for Philips Electronics, as well as working in adjacent arenas at other firms.

The University of California at Los Angeles graduate has a degree in mechanical engineering.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20110907/exclusive-silicon-valley-entrepreneur-blake-krikorian-joins-amazon-board/feed/0Lytro, the Astonishing Camera Start-Up, Celebrates Its Splashy Debut (Video)http://allthingsd.com/20110623/its-goal-in-focus-camera-start-up-lytro-takes-a-moment-to-celebrate-video/
http://allthingsd.com/20110623/its-goal-in-focus-camera-start-up-lytro-takes-a-moment-to-celebrate-video/#commentsThu, 23 Jun 2011 12:00:39 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=90009Although they still have a lot of work to do to ship their first cameras later this year, the team from Lytro took time out Monday to celebrate their splashy debut.

The company, which for several years has been quietly building a new type of camera, revealed its technology this week. The Mountain View company is using an approach known as light-field imagery, which offers a number of advantages over traditional photography, most notably the ability to focus and refocus an image after it has been taken.

Guests at Lytro’s San Francisco art gallery launch event on Wednesday night had a chance to appear in their own light-field portraits, striking a pose alongside circus performers. The crowd featured many of those responsible for Lytro’s technology, including the Stanford professors that guided CEO Ren Ng’s early research, the company’s early funders and advisers, and the team that helped it pull off its splashy launch, which had Lytro featured all day Wednesday as the top tech story on Google News.

At the event, I had a chance to catch up with Ng, as well as some of the company’s early investors, including Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz, Intuit founder Scott Cook and former Greylock partner Charles Chi, who is now the company’s full-time executive chairman.

Speaking to the crowd, Chi recalled his seemingly crazy decision, several years ago, to invest in a company with an academic at the helm and a bizarre business model. The positive response the company got to its launch, Chi said, showed that maybe it wasn’t that crazy after all.

“I wasn’t totally delirious all those years ago making that first investment,” Chi said.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20110623/its-goal-in-focus-camera-start-up-lytro-takes-a-moment-to-celebrate-video/feed/0BlackBerry's Fuzzy Forecast and Pictures That Never Are (Video)http://allthingsd.com/20110622/blackberrys-fuzzy-forecast-and-pictures-that-never-are-video/
http://allthingsd.com/20110622/blackberrys-fuzzy-forecast-and-pictures-that-never-are-video/#commentsWed, 22 Jun 2011 18:41:00 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=89696It was a mobile-filled Digits show on Wednesday.

Katie Boehret kicked off the show with her review of Mango, the forthcoming Windows Phone update. I’ve also been playing around with the new software and think it tells us a lot about where Microsoft is heading with Windows Phone — namely a continued focus away from apps and toward integrating the people we care about with the tasks we do on our phones. It’s an interesting approach.

A Mountain View start-up is promising that its camera, due later this year, will bring the biggest change to photography since the transition from film to digital.

Ordinarily, I’m turned off by such hyperbole, but after having seen a demo from Lytro, that statement seems downright reasonable.

The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields — basically, all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken.

This means capturing that perfect shot of your fast-moving pet or squirming child could soon get a whole lot easier. Instead of having to manually focus or wait for autofocus to kick in and hopefully center on the right thing, pictures can be taken immediately and in rapid succession. Once the picture is on a computer or phone, the focus can be adjusted to center on any object in the image, also allowing for cool artsy shots where one shifts between a blurry foreground and sharp background and vice versa.

“A really well-composed light-field picture can tell a story in a new way,” says Ren Ng, the company’s founder and chief executive (pictured above with an early prototype light-field camera).

Lytro’s camera works by positioning an array of tiny lenses between the main lens and the image sensor, with the microlenses measuring both the total amount of light coming in as well as its direction.

The technology also allows photos to be taken in very low-light conditions without a flash, as well as for some eye-popping three-dimensional images to be taken with just a single lens. To view photos in full 3-D, users still need some sort of 3-D display, such as a 3-D phone, PC or television. However, even without such a display, a certain amount of 3-D is visible.

Once images are captured, they can be posted to Facebook and shared via any modern Web browser, including mobile devices such as the iPhone.

To get a glimpse of this, check out the photo above, as seen from two focal points, or try changing the focus yourself on the image embedded below. Once the photo has loaded, try clicking on different parts of the image to change the focus. (For those who really like this, I’ve included a few more images at the bottom of the story.) There is also a video interview with Ng, where he explains the technology and shows it in action.

The interesting choice that Lytro has made is to go into the camera business itself, rather than license out its technology to established camera makers. It hopes to have a point-and-shoot model on sale later this year. The device will be “reasonably priced,” but Lytro didn’t offer further details.

“It will be a competitively priced consumer product that fits in your pocket,” Ng said.

Of course, going into the camera business means that Lytro has a lot of work ahead of itself. The company currently has about 45 employees, mostly in Mountain View, though it also has a few at a newly opened office in Hong Kong. To fund the effort, Lytro has raised roughly $50 million in funding over the past couple of years, most recently in a Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Early investors include Intuit’s Scott Cook, VMware’s Diane Greene and venture capitalist Charles Chi, who is now working at Lytro.

“Lytro’s breakthrough technology will make conventional digital cameras obsolete,” Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen said in a statement. “It has to be seen to be believed.”

Ng didn’t go quite that far in our interview, but he did say he hopes that Lytro will reinvigorate — and eventually transform — the entire camera industry. Digital cameras are still big business, to be sure, but many people are finding they are carrying their camera — especially those of the point-and-shoot variety — a whole lot less.

In large part, that’s due to the rise of the smartphone. But Ng hopes Lytro will change all of that.

Lytro isn’t the only company pursuing camera technologies that go beyond the traditional snapshot. There are, of course, lots of 3-D cameras coming to market on cellphones, notably the soon-to-ship Evo 3D from HTC and Sprint. Meanwhile, Adobe has also explored the implications of light-field technology and its former CEO, Bruce Chizen, is on Lytro’s technical advisory board.

Light-field technology was developed back in the 1990s, and initially required 100 cameras attached to a supercomputer. During his graduate studies at Stanford in the mid-2000s, Ng looked at how the technology could be both miniaturized and commercialized. After graduating, he founded the company now known as Lytro, which got seed funding back in 2007, and has been quietly working to get the technology mature enough for the consumer market.

The key will be how quickly — and at what price — Lytro can bring its technology to market. The company isn’t offering a lot of details beyond confirming it plans to bring out its first camera later this year. That device, Ng said, will only take still images, though there is the potential to use light-field technology for videos, as well as for scientific and medical imagery, down the road.